Demonetisation to make poor suffer the most

Nawanshahr: Thanks to demonetisation, all businesses from small kirana stores to wholesalers have been reporting a fall in sales in the last few days due to the prevailing cash crunch in the market.

The traders have stopped getting goods from New Delhi, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Ambala and other towns as big traders are busy getting own demonetised currency regularised or are facing the shortage of raw material leading to suspension of manufacturing of new lot of products. A local wholesale trader of shoes Jagmohan Khanna said that though they were getting supply of already manufactured shoes etc from the manufacturers, new products with latest designs were hard to get as the factory-owners were not getting the requisite raw material for them.

According to Khanna their sales were also being adversely affected as some products related to shoes like laces, socks etc are witnessing short supply. Similar, is the situation with the businessmen dealing in hosiery products and readymade clothes.

They are not facing any difficulty in getting manufactured goods from Ludhiana but are not getting any supplies from places like Surat and Delhi. Sanjiv, a general merchant on Kothi Road here too maintained that despite it being a wedding season, there were few customers in the market. Kewal Arora, vice-president of Kothi Road Shopkeepers Association said that almost all businesses had seen a dip in sales to the tune of 30-35 per cent. A visit to the local sabzimandi showed that pea growers too were facing hardships in getting labour for harvesting their crops as they were unable to pay them (the labourers) their labour at the end of the day due cash crunch. Charan Singh, a pea farmer of Kishanpura said that as he was getting payment in the form of cheques for the pea crop sold in the mandi, he was unable to pay his labourers because of restrictions on withdrawal of money. It needs to be mentioned that harvesting of vegetable crops is highly a manual and labour-intensive exercise. A local commission agent Makhan Singh Grewal has demanded an increase in cap on the amount fixed for withdrawing cash from current accounts.Interestingly, the small vegetable vendors in the mandi and the purchasers there, mostly from the lower strata of society who are being termed as the worst sufferers of demonetisation drive by various political outfits, were found endorsing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation drive. “It is going to benefit us, the common man in near future,” was their most common refrain.